ot drown you,' Falconer said. 'It can only stop your
breath. It cannot stop your thinking. You will go on thinking, thinking,
all the same. Drowning people remember in a moment all their past lives.
All their evil deeds come up before them, as if they were doing them all
over again. So they plunge back into the past and all its misery. While
their bodies are drowning, their souls are coming more and more awake.'

'That is dreadful,' she murmured, with her great eyes fixed on his, and
growing steadier in their regard. She had ceased to struggle, so he had
slackened his hold of her, and she was leaning back against the fence.

'And then,' he went on, 'what if, instead of closing your eyes, as you
expected, and going to sleep, and forgetting everything, you should
find them come open all at once, in the midst of a multitude of eyes all
round about you, all looking at you, all thinking about you, all judging
you? What if you should hear, not a tumult of voices and noises,
from which you could hope to hide, but a solemn company talking about
you--every word clear and plain, piercing your heart with what you could
not deny,--and you standing naked and shivering in the midst of them?'

'It is too dreadful!' she cried, making a movement as if the very horror
of the idea had a fascination to draw her towards the realization of it.
'But,' she added, yielding to Falconer's renewed grasp, 'they wouldn't
be so hard upon me there. They would not be so cruel as men are here.'

'Surely not. But all men are not cruel. I am not cruel,' he added,
forgetting himself for a moment, and caressing with his huge hand the
wild pale face that glimmered upon him as it were out of the infinite
night--all but swallowed up in it.

She drew herself back, and Falconer, instantly removing his hand, said,

'Look in my face, child, and see whether you cannot trust me.'

As he uttered the words, he took off his hat, and stood bare-headed in
the moon, which now broke out clear from the clouds. She did look at
him. His hair blew about his face. He turned it towards the wind and the
moon, and away from her, that she might be undisturbed in her scrutiny.
But how she judged of him, I cannot tell; for the next moment he called
out in a tone of repressed excitement,

'Gordon, Gordon, look there--above your head, on the other bridge.'

I looked and saw a gray head peering over the same gap through which
Falconer had looked a few minutes before. I knew somet